CHAPTER XXV

MOSES MENDELSSOHN

Mendelssohn’s
German Translation of the
Bible.—­Phaedo.—­Jerusalem.—­Lessing’s
“Nathan the Wise.”

Moses, the son of Mendel, was born in Dessau in 1728,
and died in Berlin in 1786. His father was poor,
and he himself was of a weak constitution. But
his stunted form was animated by a strenuous spirit.
After a boyhood passed under conditions which did
little to stimulate his dawning aspirations, Mendelssohn
resolved to follow his teacher Fraenkel to Berlin.
He trudged the whole way on foot, and was all but refused
admission into the Prussian capital, where he was destined
to produce so profound an impression. In Berlin
his struggle with poverty continued, but his condition
was improved when he obtained a post, first as private
tutor, then as book-keeper in a silk factory.

Berlin was at this time the scene of an intellectual
and aesthetic revival dominated by Frederick the Great.
The latter, a dilettante in culture, was, as Mendelssohn
said of him, a man “who made the arts and sciences
flourish, and made liberty of thought universal in
his realm.” The German Jews were as yet
outside this revival. In Italy and Holland the
new movements of the seventeenth and the eighteenth
century had found Jews well to the fore. But
the “German” Jews—­and this term
included the great bulk of the Jews of Europe—­were
suffering from the effects of intellectual stagnation.
The Talmud still exercised the mind and imagination
of these Jews, but culture and religion were separated.
Mendelssohn in a hundred places contends that such
separation is dangerous and unnatural. It was
his service to Judaism that he made the separation
once for all obsolete.

Mendelssohn effected this by purely literary means.
Most reformations have been at least aided by moral
and political forces. But the Mendelssohnian
revival in Judaism was a literary revival, in which
moral and religious forces had only an indirect influence.
By the aid of greater refinement of language, for
hitherto the “German” Jews had not spoken
pure German; by a widening of the scope of education
in the Jewish schools; by the introduction of all
that is known as culture, Mendelssohn changed the
whole aspect of Jewish life. And he produced
this reformation by books and by books alone.
Never playing the part of a religious or moral reformer,
Mendelssohn became the Jewish apostle of culture.